When students are at a physical distance from instructors and peers, we must be intentional about setting up community building structures from day one of the course (or even in the week prior to the course starting).

This blog post will explore ways to set up the learning environment to encourage community and sharing across boundaries (physical and technological). There are logistical and pedagogical considerations when we look at designing "boundaryless" learning environments where there is considerable physical distance between instructors and students. What we aim to do, however, is make "distance" into connection by humanizing our online classes. As Robin DeRosa notes, "Everyone is separate from you, but everyone in this room could be mapped onto your world and become connected...And if distance holds in it the seeds of connections, what does that mean about how we think about the world wide web, the connective technology that we are only beginning to understand in education?”

How do we create immediate connection with students, set up the learning environment to support community and use collaborative technology tools to support this work? The answer begins with a set of questions:

What do I want to know about my learners from the very beginning of the course?

What do I want them to know about me?

How do I want students to begin to interact with one another and to get to know each other?

What barriers might exist that will inhibit my connection to students and from student to student?

How might I begin to connect who my learners are to the content of the course?

These are not the usual questions we ask when we begin a course. They aren’t focused on learning objectives or outcomes or assessment or grades. Instead, the focus at the start of a course that takes place in a digital or distant environment should be about building relationship.

It’s worth noting that, when we go online to teach, a couple of things happen: first, we tend to get more task- or goal-oriented than we might be in the classroom. While most of us really long for connection with our students through the screen, we nonetheless don’t put relationships at the forefront of our course planning. When we write our syllabus, when we record a video lecture or an introduction, when we set up rubrics in Canvas, we are thinking less about who and where our students are than what we want them to do, how we want them to perform. And, in the desire to make expectations crystal clear, the language we use can become formal, almost robotic.

The other thing that tends to happen right away is that we assume, since we can’t see our students, they will cheat, plagiarize, and work less. That sets up an adversarial relationship with students even as we hope to build stronger relationships and rapport across distance. Creating that rapport is a kind of digital literacy. If we are going to make teaching and learning at a distance work, we need to recognize that what we face are not actually bureaucratic or policy or academic integrity issues. Nor are they technological issues. Using a videoconferencing platform isn’t like waving a magic wand: it doesn’t actually bring people into a room, but only gives the illusion that they are present. It’s just as easy to bring in someone virtually as it is easy to forget they are there.

The digital literacy that we require in this case is an interpersonal one. We have to cultivate our ability to teach through the screen.

Once we choose to make a commitment to this digital literacy of relationship, we can begin to take steps toward teaching and learning. Some of those steps might include:

Always asking: “Who is not in the room who could be?”

Checking in across distance to see how learning is coming along.

Allowing time in synchronous meetings and collaborations for connecting and relationship-building.

Recognize and appreciate time zone differences. Early morning means different things to different people.

Perhaps most importantly, we must develop empathy for one another in virtual or digitally-inflected spaces. It may seem like learning from home is easier (pjs and comfy chairs, studying in bed, etc.) but it also means that most learning happens alone. And rushing to an online class is very different from having to cross campus to make it on time.

What are your biggest concerns with teaching across distance? Or teaching in a room where some students are in desks and some are on-screen? How will you solve the issues that hybridity creates?

We should start here: digital teaching is different from the technology which enables it. In other words, learning our way around technology won’t make us more or less capable of teaching in digital spaces, though it will help us develop a certain literacy, or automaticity. Educational technology—the learning management system (Canvas) and tools like Turnitin or Protorio—cannot, should not, stand in for either the classroom or the teacher. Instead, they are vehicles across which our teaching can be conveyed.

In other words, as we begin to consider a strategy for education this Fall—as uncertain as the autumn may be—we must focus on our teaching: the how, the why, the where. We need to know who we are, what we value most about teaching and learning, what we don’t want to lose when we go digital. Then, we can move more confidently into using the technologies available to us, always keeping in mind that it is tech that should bend to pedagogy, and not the other way around.

No one’s quite sure what our circumstances will be this Fall. To some degree, we hope to return to campus; but we also know that social distancing guidelines won’t allow for the whole student body to occupy those halls and classrooms. Some students may need or choose to learn fully online. Some of us will want and be able to teach synchronously (live), and it’s very likely a lot of teaching and learning will happen asynchronously. We are looking at teaching online, in some hybrid format, or face-to-face… and possibly some combination of the three.

So, it behooves us to spend some time getting to know our pedagogies, and also the pedagogies of the digital landscape we’re moving toward. Since the inception of online learning over two decades ago, a certain swath of educators and scholars of teaching and learning have spent time theorizing about digital learning, hybrid pedagogy, synchronous and asynchronous community-building, and more. This week, we’ll read some of those educators, mining their long history with digital teaching and learning online for perspectives that will help us, and to get a better sense of the landscape.

Just as important, this week we’ll start to understand ourselves as digital learners, to begin to get a sense for how it feels to study alone, to have to find novel ways to reach out for community, to participate and to ask questions about what participation looks like. Because as part of this academy, we are not just teacher-learners, but we are also learner-learners; this academy is as much about the material and practice it provides as it is a model of online teaching available for your inspection. Just as you work through recommended readings, or participate in activities, so you might also keep your eyes trained on how learning here works. Because there is a pedagogy to this academy; and while it may not be your pedagogy, it is evidence that pedagogy can thrive online.

Recommended Readings for this Week:

All of the following readings are open access and available for annotation. Remember, if you choose to join in some annotation, please be sure to jump into the HFT Summer Academy group so that your comments join those of the rest of our community.

Week One Activity: Asking and Answering Tricky Questions

As we get started on this summer academy, anxieties may be tugging at our sleeves, tensions may be high, and questions abound. What will teaching look like in the Fall? How will I know what technology to use? How will I stay in touch with my students? What is it like to teach fully online?

In this week’s activity, please join this collaborative Google Doc and let loose your biggest questions or concerns about the coming Fall. Then, take a look at what other folks have written and see if you can offer some support or advice by using the commenting function. You can do all of this anonymously, or you can sign into Google Drive and leave your name.

The goal is to begin to flex our muscles as a community of inquiry, to find common ground, and to look for ways to support each other.

Week One Reflection: Your Hybrid Pedagogy

Throughout the summer, I’ll be asking you to do some reflective work. This is your opportunity to look critically or sit quietly with your own pedagogy or yourself as a learner. You can keep these reflections wherever you like: in a journal, in MS Word, on an audio recording, etc. You won’t be showing these to anyone, unless you choose to. And, if you come upon some writing you really want to share out, let me know and we can publish it to the HFT blog.

This week, spend some time thinking about the readings, and how these ideas of hybrid pedagogy, hyflex models, synchronous vs. asynchronous learning all intersect with your own pedagogy, with how you teach and how you see yourself as a teacher.

Blog Comments

If you like, you can post your thoughts about getting started this week right here in the blog comments (below). You could also use that space to introduce yourself, talk about your goals, ask questions, etc. Feel free to use the comments space on any blog post as part of your participation in the academy.

Welcome to the Hybrid-Flexible Teaching Summer Academy! This 10-week professional development experience has been created by the School of Education and Human Development, in cooperation with ThinqStudio and Digital Pedagogy Lab. The academy is designed to provide CU Denver faculty and graduate students an opportunity to:

Define for themselves hybrid-flexible or online teaching methods that most closely align with their teaching style.

Make meaningful changes for their Fall 2020 courses, whether those courses will be taught online, on-ground, or in a hybrid-flexible format.

Understand the primary technologies and methodologies used for hybrid-flexible or online teaching.

Bring into conversation instructors’ pedagogy and the technologies of digitally-inflected learning environments.

Build a strong, agile pedagogical self in digital space.

This post includes some orientation information for the academy. Think of this as a kind of syllabus—long, but worth paying attention to. So, if you’re joining us for the summer, read on!

How the Academy is Designed

The HFT Summer Academy is designed as a fully online experience with both synchronous and asynchronous components. As a participant, you will be able to join in online activities, read and annotate articles about hybrid pedagogy, work in the Canvas LMS, and attend weekly office hours held in Zoom. Much of the summer academy is open access and takes place on the open web, and is not constrained by the boundaries of the LMS. This is in keeping with the hybrid-flexible model of teaching and learning, for which one of the primary characteristics is that learning goes where you go, and learners always have multiple points of entry.

You will be using the following digital platforms for the summer academy:

Canvas (you’ll be invited to the HFT Canvas course a little later)

Google Docs

Hypothes.is (if you don’t know what this is, don’t worry)

Zoom

And the main entry point—the “home” of the academy—is the ThinqStudio site, built on the Ghost blogging platform.

Think about the academy as a classroom with workstations. At one station, there are blog posts and recommended readings for each week; at another, Canvas; at another we gather around to annotate the web using Hypothesis. Throughout the summer, you will be free to move from workstation to workstation, depending on your need or desire path.

How the Learning is Designed

The learning design behind the academy is aimed at giving you as personalized and useful an experience as possible. While it does not mimic the usual online course offered at the university, it does work to model the kinds of hybrid approaches to teaching and learning that will prove helpful (and possibly necessary) in the Fall 2020 semester.

The academy is a resource with a timeline. Here, you will find lots of places to dive in and explore in depth the pedagogies, practices, and platforms related to online and hybrid teaching. You’ll have the opportunity to try your hand at design, using new tools, discover best practices, and more. Things will unfold week by week (see the schedule below), and you can choose to keep up, or you can go at your own pace, returning to the materials from past weeks whenever you wish.

That said, there is a pattern to the weeks ahead. The learning is not so much “scaffolded” as it is a narration, with some ideas coming before other ideas for the sake of literacy. But you can still choose your own adventure. In fact, I encourage you to consider a project for the summer, something you want to walk away with at the end of our ten weeks. That could be a newly designed course, a rewritten syllabus, proficiency with a particular tool, etc. It’s up to you; but if you decide on a project, make sure it’s related to how you’ll be teaching this Fall.

You are the captain of your own learning this summer. Though I will be checking in on a regular basis, I will not be checking “up” on you.

What to Expect Each Week

Each week will begin with a blog post and a video from me to set the theme for the week and get you started on reading and activities. Mid-week, you’ll see another blog post, usually from a “guest lecturer,” offering other insights and perspectives. And the week will wrap up with Zoom office hours (for which you’ll need to register) where we can jump into conversations with one another.

Throughout the week, you’ll be reading, joining in collaborative, social annotation, experimenting with some activities, and possibly doing some writing yourself. You can commit as much or as little time to the academy each week as suits you.

Your participation and contribution to our learning will come in the form of: comments on blog posts, Hypothesis annotations, discussions during office hours, collaboration on activities... and, if you feel inclined, your own blog writing to be posted on the HFT site.

I will be your primary facilitator for the academy, and so don’t hesitate to reach out to me when you need help. There will be other voices in the mix, too—some faculty, some students—and they’ll be available to guide you along when you need support.

Getting Started Checklist

Before you get started, make sure you’ve completed the following items:

Complete the My HFT Summer Academy Goals form. (This is optional and only designed to help you set and keep track of your intended outcomes.)

Most of what we know about the Fall 2020 term is uncertain. We know the way we teach and how students learn will be affected by COVID-19, and that our work will not look the same as when we left the classroom in the Spring. If we are in classrooms, they will not be the same familiar spaces. Some of our students may be in the room with us, while others will remain online; and it’s more likely than not that all our teaching will be, in one way or another, digital. We will need to be flexible, adaptable, and agile.

We would like to invite you to join a summer academy designed to prepare you for the uncertainty of the Fall 2020 term—and to turn that uncertainty into possibility. The Hybrid-Flexible Teaching (HFT) Summer Academy will look at pedagogical approaches which favor the human over the technological, but will also offer opportunities to practice with the tools we’ll need to use to support students this autumn, namely the Canvas LMS and Zoom video conferencing. We’ll also spend time investigating some more flexible tools which will make your teaching more agile and responsive, no matter if you are teaching in the classroom or online.

The HFT summer academy is designed to provide CU Denver faculty and graduate students an opportunity to:

Define for themselves hybrid-flexible or online teaching methods that most closely align with their teaching style.

Make meaningful changes for their Fall 2020 courses, whether those courses will be taught online, on-ground, or in a hybrid-flexible format.

Understand the primary technologies and methodologies used for hybrid-flexible or online teaching.

Bring into conversation instructors’ pedagogy and the technologies of digitally-inflected learning environments.

Build a strong, agile pedagogical self in digital space.

The academy will run from June 1st through August 7 and is open to all CU Denver faculty and graduate students. In the spirit of the HyFlex model, the course is designed to provide you maximum flexibility in your participation, and will support all participants through an active community of inquiry. Weekly Zoom sessions, recommended readings, learning invitations and provocations—as well as the material generated by the community itself—will offer you multiple points of entry and boundary-less ways to participate.

The HFT Summer Academy is supported by the Learning Design and Technology program in the School of Education and Human Development, the Graduate School, CETL, ThinqStudio, Digital Pedagogy Lab, and ASPIRE. These groups are committed to creating excellent digital learning experiences—for both students and faculty—across the CU Denver campus.To register for the academy, complete this quick form. If you have questions, contact Sean Michael Morris in LDT at sean.m.morris@ucdenver.edu.

ThinqStudio applauds the announcement that Sean Michael Morris is joining the University of Colorado Denver’s School of Education and Human Development (SEHD) as a Senior Instructor in the Learning, Design, and Technology (LDT) program. So, too, do we anticipate Sean’s valuable contributions to ThinqStudio. We are thrilled to

ThinqStudio applauds the announcement that Sean Michael Morris is joining the University of Colorado Denver’s School of Education and Human Development (SEHD) as a Senior Instructor in the Learning, Design, and Technology (LDT) program. So, too, do we anticipate Sean’s valuable contributions to ThinqStudio. We are thrilled to have Sean’s distinct talents and voice joining our chorus of faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and students attuned to critical digital pedagogy.

“Sean brings a remarkable inventory of expertise in the fields of digital teaching, learning, and design; and we are elated to have him joining our faculty, mentoring our students, and shaping our curriculum. He is an incredible addition to our School and the institution at large.” Rebecca Kantor, SEHD Dean

In addition to his faculty role in the SEHD, Sean will continue his role as Director of Digital Pedagogy Lab (DPL), which is relocating to CU Denver in July, 2020. As long standing DPL alum, ThinqStudio is pleased to assist with this transition and next chapter to CU Denver’s campus in downtown Denver. Sean and co-director Jesse Stommel will continue leading and championing DPL as an international event centered on pedagogies that are critical, open, inclusive, and digital. Notably, ThinqStudio has been steadily engaged with DPL for the past four years, having supported cross-disciplinary faculty cohorts at each summer gathering since 2016. In total, 32 CU Denver faculty have attended DPL.

DPL and ThinqStudio will operate in partnership as two sides of the same coin. ThinqStudio will continue to focus internally as a learning-design studio and CU Denver community of practice, with Sean Michael Morris joining our ranks. DPL will continue as an external annual event serving national and international colleagues, with ThinqStudio serving as a thought-partner and support along the way. Together, we will expand our scope and impact both internally and externally with CU Denver as our shared home.

“We have been building community momentum around teaching innovation for a few years now, and Sean’s arrival represents a tipping-point of sorts for us both in ThinqStudio as well as the SEHD. We want to support Sean & Jessie’s ongoing work with the Digital Pedagogy Lab, and we want to blend more of the DPL ethos into our own curriculum and culture. We see incredible potential for what happens next…” Brad Hinson, SEHD Assistant Dean/Instructor & ThinqStudio Partner.

Sean Michael Morris officially joins the CU Denver School of Education and Human Development in Fall 2019, serving as faculty and continuing as the Director of the Digital Pedagogy Lab.

Follow both @ThinqStudio and @DigPedLab for additional information and updates throughout the 2019-2020 academic year.

]]> I am an Associate Professor in the School of Education and Human Development and Director of the Right to Learn Undergraduate Research Collective (R2L). Keeping in mind the “lead activities” of the university—to foster independent thought, to midwife creativity, to humanize—and the way these undertakings are currently imperiled]]>https://thinqstudio.us/right-to-learn-r2l/5deea14aa6492800016777cdWed, 22 May 2019 19:45:34 GMT I am an Associate Professor in the School of Education and Human Development and Director of the Right to Learn Undergraduate Research Collective (R2L). Keeping in mind the “lead activities” of the university—to foster independent thought, to midwife creativity, to humanize—and the way these undertakings are currently imperiled or marginalized (every generation faces this issue), I feel compelled to say a few things about the kind of research R2L is doing and its connection to the ThinqStudio. Let me to provide a bit of history.
Now in its twelfth year of existence—we did not even know we existed the first year; we did not have a name for the first four years—R2L is fashioning an argument for education as a fundamental right of personhood based on the principles of dignity. We are in the midst of producing two “dignity artifacts.” One, a handbook of the content and criteria of dignity in two landmark cases (Tennessee v. Lane, 2004 & Lobato v. Colorado, 2013). Two, a transcript of approximately 18 hours of audio recordings of a 1962 voter registration workshop sponsored by the Highlander Folk School. Together, these creative products demonstrate how we treat the manifestation of dignity as a social interactional fact, an observable and researchable phenomenon with roots in social life.
We are thriving as a research group, but this was not always so. As recently as 2017, R2L was slowly passing away. The confluence of a number of factors (ThinqStudio among them) help tell the story of how R2L, comprised of four generations of undergraduates, moved from surviving to flourishing. (Before going further, here are the members of R2L in order of seniority: Tania Soto-Valenzuela, Mandy Wong, Tamara Lhungay, Maria Velasco, Valencia Seidl, Arliss Howard, Frida Silva, Diego Ulibarrí, and Raquel Isaac). I had to clear my plate and re-dedicate myself (for, like, the thirtieth time) to R2L. What did this mean? Securing time and funding. Without funding, a research project will learn to live on the margins. Without time, a project will exist as if on an intravenous feed. I put together three grant proposals over the course of a few months. (From 2007 to 2017, R2L had existed on approximately $250 a year. Enough for a single group lunch and a few books.) If the fortunes of R2L were to change, funding would have to be coaxed from the parched ground.
The first pitch to a foundation in downtown Denver ultimately resulted in no funding, but served to build solidarity among the group. Why? We made the pitch together; we shared the disappointment. The enduring memory: the R2L group in a fancy elevator, silent as the door closed, and then letting loose a collective scream in celebration of our efforts.
The second proposal to one of the most prestigious foundations in our country was initially rejected. In a strange, but fortuitous string of events, the proposal was eventually funded after finding a number of advocates. (As any scholar can attest, this is an extremely rare occurrence.) The third proposal was funded by CU Denver’s Office of Research Services, headed by Associate Vice Chancellor Bob Damrauer. In the span of a month, we went from nothing to close to $90,000 in funding. Any Principal Investigator of a humanities and social science project knows that this is like hitting the sweepstakes. For the first time in R2L’s history, we were flush.
In March of 2018, we presented our work on the content and criteria of dignity at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities in the grand halls of the Georgetown Law School. The all-too-simple explanation would be that the funding was directly responsible for our success. Any experienced scholar knows that funding purchases the “labor potential” of a research team. However, the work must still be carried out smartly, creatively, and efficiently. Funding is opportunity, but it does not tell us how ideas can become a viable and potent research agenda, the fruits of which can touch reality.
Without the existence of ThinqStudio—i.e., the network of creative scholars who constitute the group, the space it holds for innovative thinking around digital tools and socially engaged work—the R2L group may never have learned to flourish. Credit for contact between the two groups can be traced to Dr. Remi Kalir, a ThinqStudio affiliate, and a conversation we had about the utility of Hypothesis, an online annotation application, to R2L’s work. Before Dr. Kalir, we were slowly organizing our work around close reads of the extensive court record in Tennessee v. Lane and Lobato v. Colorado. (Again, our theory was that to fashion a novel and effective argument regarding education as a fundamental right of personhood, we had to become experts in the way that the concept of dignity was used in high-stakes, landmark cases.) More specifically, we were collectively reading “difficult primary texts,” but our “interface” was happening on 5 x 7 notecards. Our thinking was rich and robust, but our mode of communication was antiquated and inefficient. Hypothesis, allowed us to read, annotate, and curate documents online. An annotation made by an R2L research associate at 2am could be followed up with ease 7 minutes or 7 days later by another member. Questions and explanations, hunches and assertions, all found continued life online. Our process was made visible and retrievable. Moment-to-moment exchanges could now benefit our future thinking with greater clarity and efficiency. Through systematic “bidding”—a “homemade” process through which claims regarding the content and criteria of dignity in the primary documents were subjected to scrutiny through discussion—we were becoming of one mind that did not require absolute agreement across the board.
I was given the honor of being a ThinqFellow in 2018. The experience of thinking about digital technologies and their value to the educational process has been invaluable. Last week, I gave a “mini-keynote” at the Online Learning Consortium Innovate Conference in Denver. I spoke words that would not have been possible without the ThinqStudio “catalyst” in my experience as a scholar and person. I described the work of R2L as “human rights work…the slow, intergenerational work of contributing to the creation of human rights norms in society.” The words surprised me. Never before had I described our work in that way. If the normative planetary fact of dignity makes our work intelligible (grammatical and syntactical conventions alone cannot make something comprehensible), and the human mind makes a dignity argument for education as a fundamental right possible, then things like ThinqStudio (i.e., a network of intelligent moral agents with tool-oriented expertise) make this kind of argument realizable.

The “Beyond Grading” workshop in March was a highlight of the year. We had great discussions, I got new ideas for my courses, and we continued building a community of people who are interested in questioning grading and rethinking assessment.

I am reminded of how important it is to develop and maintain this community every time I talk about my work as a faculty fellow to colleagues who are unfamiliar with these ideas. When I tell people I’m working on quitting grading or that I’m going to spend the first three weeks of my graduate seminar in the fall guiding students through designing the syllabus, I usually get one of two reactions: (1) silence and a look of utter horror or (2) something that sounds like, “ha! good luck with that.”

Every time this happens, I am grateful for all the people I’ve met and collaborated with through ThinqStudio who are excited and interested when I tell them about my plans. And it makes me recommit to building and maintaining this community. Would you like to join us? Here’s how:

Email me if you’d like to be notified about future “beyond grading” meetings and events.

When I started out as a ThinqStudio fellow, I knew it would involve going to DPL, trying out some new things in my courses, and writing some blog posts. What I didn’t anticipate is that the most valuable part of this year–and the thing that makes experimenting even feel possible–is the people at CU Denver and beyond I’ve connected with though ThinqStudio events and programs.

Reflections on self-assessment

Not all of my students this semester thought that self-assessment helped their learning, but a large majority did. One of the challenges I need to work on with this method is to do a bit more to help students understand how to assess themselves accurately. A few felt like they gave themselves too many or too few points, at least on occasion. Or perhaps for some it’s simply a matter of helping them feel more confident assessing themselves.

Note that these percentages add up to more than 100% because they could choose more than one answer if they’d ever had any of these feelings over the course of whole semester.

Part of the problem here was my overly complicated weekly point-calculation system. In the Fall, they’re don’t going to give themselves a point value each week, but they’ll still write weekly reflections on their goals and challenges. Then, at midterm and the end of the semester, they’ll provide evidence from those reflections to justify a letter grade. If I don’t agree with them, we’ll have a conversation to sort it out.

My experiments in ungrading have continued to evolve over the semester. In moving away from points and towards a simpler system in which all assessment and feedback — except at midterm and the end of the semester — is qualitative, I wonder if students will feel adrift or if they will appreciate the self-determination? No doubt I’ll encounter both, but my ongoing question is: How can I best set up students for success with self-assessment?

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On March 9, more than two dozen faculty members and staff from around CU Denver and beyond gathered for a one-day workshop on rethinking grading. We began the day by discussing, “What is the purpose of grades?” and “What are the drawbacks of grades?” Then, Jesse

On March 9, more than two dozen faculty members and staff from around CU Denver and beyond gathered for a one-day workshop on rethinking grading. We began the day by discussing, “What is the purpose of grades?” and “What are the drawbacks of grades?” Then, Jesse Stommel joined us via Zoom to talk about his experiences not-grading, and answered a lot of audience questions. After lunch, John Tinnell and Dale Stahl shared their methods of peer assessment in writing projects. We closed the day by workshopping some new ideas for our courses as a group.

New ideas

I was inspired and energized by the day and personally got a lot of new ideas I am eager to try out next semester.

The first is that I’m going to get rid of late penalties in my online course and see what happens. Why? One study that Stommel shared with us convinced me to try it: a daycare center had a problem with parents picking up their kids late, so they added a fine to try to fix this problem. But what happened was that people were more late once there was a financial penalty–they just did the calculation and figured it was worth it to pay the penalty. I had long assumed I needed late penalties to force students to turn in their work on time, but because my course has weekly team meetings, there is already social accountability for getting work done on time, so I think this will work well.

The second thing is that I started developing a plan for how I’m going to democratize my graduate seminar next semester. At first I thought this might not work because it’s my program’s intro course, and it needs to cover certain topics so students are prepared for the rest of the program–it can’t be a free for all. But in a small group discussion, my table-mates offered a solution: have the students interview the faculty and more advanced graduate students to figure out what they’ll need to learn in this course to succeed in the program. Then we’ll use those interviews to develop the learning outcomes and the syllabus together. As the research on learner-centered teaching suggests, the students will hopefully be more invested in the work because they chose it and they’ll know why it matters.

Next steps

If you are interested in continuing (or joining!) this conversation about grading, you are welcome to attend a follow-up meeting on Friday April 13, 9:00-10:30 am, in Student Commons (1201 Larimer) room 3018. At this meeting, we’ll discuss how we want to continue developing these ideas and supporting each other in the following year. If you’d like to attend remotely, we’ll do an audio-only zoom stream as well, using this link: https://ucdenver.zoom.us/my/amyhasinoff

I’ve posted a bunch more articles in a Slack channel, which anyone is welcome to join.

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I have long entertained ideas of a Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) initiative at CU Denver, imagining the pros, cons, and realities of such an effort. What would it look like if we created a platform for our people and their projects on the open web? Not courses, per

I have long entertained ideas of a Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) initiative at CU Denver, imagining the pros, cons, and realities of such an effort. What would it look like if we created a platform for our people and their projects on the open web? Not courses, per se, and not a highly structured content system such as Canvas; but a creative space for professional portfolios, digital projects, and scholarly presence. A space for each individual to express him/herself and present his/her best works. How might we teach, learn, and collaborate in a creative collective like this?

I soon found colleagues throughout the University of Colorado system who were just as familiar and interested in this digital-studio concept. As we openly and collectively daydreamed, folks within ear-shot leaned-in. Over the past two years these conversations have taken-root within the School of Education & Human Development (SEHD) and ultimately within ThinqStudio. Within the SEHD, Dean Rebecca Kantor, effectively challenged us:

Let’s explore Domains, and see how it shapes our pedagogy, and the pedagogy of our teacher-candidates entering the K12 classroom. Let’s see what’s there.

For those unfamiliar with Domain of One’s Own (DoOO), I refer to this, this and this – for background. This movement has evolved for years within universities across the US and Europe. It’s worth noting that our inquiry formed over the past few years as paths crossed at events such as COLTT and the Digital Pedagogy Lab (DPL), where Domains is well established. Along the way, we consulted with CU Online and Reclaim Hosting; we attended the Domains 2017 conference to further educate ourselves; and we continue to draw upon the experience and advice of our DPL colleagues to this day. Serendipity being what it is, SEHD’s own Julia Kantor joined us this year as a Faculty Fellow and promptly declared this as a component of her ThinqStudio inquiry. The dominoes align.

And so an inquiry-group of faculty and students from the SEHD’s Teacher Preparation program gathered to study, test, and explore the affordances and realities of a digital-studio based pedagogy. We are a group of 18 SEHD faculty and students assessing the pedagogical value, the risk and the affordances of this type of open pedagogy. We are engaged in a shared-reading of Transformative Teachers: Teacher Leadership and Learning in a Connected World by Kira Baker-Doyle to guide our dialog. We quickly decided to focus our attention intently on connected learning; and intently avoid the technical rabbit holes. We agreed that the technology should be as seamless and invisible as possible; minimalist, usable, yet flexible and personalized. We agreed to promote the aesthetic and drivability of the car, and leave the mechanics under the hood- as best we could.

/rēˈmiks/: an evolving variant of an original

Some may refer to it as a prototype or a pilot-test , but I prefer to think of it as a remix – an evolving variant of an original. We have chosen to deviate from the Domains formula a bit – keeping the original beat and attribution intact, but creating something new and distinct for CU Denver. A Domain of One’s Own of our Own (DoOOoOO), if you like.

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Last week a diverse collaborative of national organizations released a set of Teacher Educator Technology Competencies that are intended to outline what teacher educators – namely, postsecondary instructors who prepare future teachers – should be doing to effectively integrate learning technologies into their instruction and academic programs. The overall list

Last week a diverse collaborative of national organizations released a set of Teacher Educator Technology Competencies that are intended to outline what teacher educators – namely, postsecondary instructors who prepare future teachers – should be doing to effectively integrate learning technologies into their instruction and academic programs. The overall list looks like this:

and an expanded item looks like this:

Of course these competencies should apply to other educator preparation programs too, including the educational leadership program in which I teach. Right now most programs that prepare school principals and superintendents aren’t doing a very good job with technology-related issues, which means that the vast majority of the 600 or so educational leadership programs across the country continue to turn out new school administrators with little exposure to the social, learning, and other technologies that are revolutionizing the world around us.

To take this one step further, I wonder how many academic programs here at CU Denver – or at most universities – would say that they are doing a good job with these sorts of instructor- and program-level technology competencies? Do we instructors have the personal technological fluency and instructional integration expertise to utilize learning technologies well in our own classrooms with our own students? Shouldn’t all postsecondary faculty – not just teachers of future teachers – be using technology to differentiate instruction to meet diverse learning needs? Shouldn’t we all be using appropriate technology tools for assessment? Shouldn’t we all be engaging in ongoing professional development and networking activities to improve the integration of technology into our teaching? And so on…

This image is from a recent Twitter thread (with 4500+ retweets and 450+ comments as of this writing) by Chris Gilliard (@hypervisible), whose research and pedagogy often point to the consequences of online systems surveilling us, built as they are on the monetization of data collected about individuals. As a consequence, groups peripheral to whatever “use case” was used to develop the system are marginalized, and these groups tend to be lower-income, people of color, and otherwise disadvantaged. Reading through this thread makes me seriously consider doing a factory reset of all my devices and deleting all my social media accounts. This litany of factual incidents makes me feel disrespected, used, and dehumanized.

Currently, these problems seem most glaringly obvious to me in the context of educational uses of social media, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and other digital tools. We require students to use tools that surveil them, tools they are right to distrust.

This is a new form of oppression. As a student, I need to use these tools to learn, but they are watching my every move. As Carol Dweck’s work on mindset has highlighted, when every task is a test of my intelligence and ability, I may shut down any exploration or learning, and I will aim to perform. I will play it safe, work beneath my ability level just to not appear wrong, dumb, etc. to those watching. We have no reason to trust the designers of these systems, the caretakers of the data. The Twitter thread above holds ample evidence that tech companies do not respect individuals, and instead are aimed only at profit. They are the oppressors.

As 2018 begins, I am thinking again about Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, particularly the part where he points out that gross imbalances of power not only harm the Oppressed, but also the Oppressors. By creating an us-versus-them power structure, not only is the humanity of the oppressed denied, but also the humanity of the oppressors is damaged. When, in our fervent debate about #edtech, did we forget this?

I am certain most educational tech designers and software engineers do not see themselves as oppressive, nor do I think they reflect much on the power they wield as they design our digital worlds. In fact, in day-to-day work, many may see themselves as dis-empowered, hard pressed to enact change within the system they inhabit. (See any meme involving “code monkeys.”) Many of them probably feel they have little to no voice in how educational systems are designed, deployed, or secured.

Yet, en masse they are deciding what data to collect, how it is aggregated, who has access, and what decisions are made based upon that data. In the name of customizing learning experiences, many are guilty of digital redlining, limiting what certain students can see or do within their systems. The algorithms and machine learning tools recreate the systemic biases already present in our world. Learning, stretching our potential, discovering new things becomes harder, the opposite of what education should do.

Yet I do understand what tech companies are attempting to do. They are trying to fulfill to potential outlined by Clayton Christensen and his collaborators when they wrote Disrupting Class. At their noblest, ed tech designers are interested in providing individualized learning experiences, where no one’s flow is interrupted by an annoying quiz or assessment, where the system notices what you’re working on and helps you keep learning. I still believe this is possible, and I believe it’s possible to do it ethically.

So, I do want the data. I want to understand what is going on for my students. Where is communication breaking down on their teams? When do they struggle with the digital tools they are using? How can I best help support their efforts?

But students should own their data and have the right to see the algorithm guiding them. No heavy-handed manipulation, no black boxes, and no proprietary B.S. I want my students to be in control of their learning, or there’s no hope of them becoming lifelong learners.

I have been part of software development processes. Good ones involve sitting alongside a business and really understanding the needs at multiple levels, with many, many different kinds of users involved. Are they asking all types of students, and if at the K-12 levels, their parents? Are they involving all kinds of instructors, as well as the learning scientists who study how we learn? Or are they only listening to those making the purchasing decisions?

So, if you want me to trust these technologies so that I will use them in my classroom, I want a seat at the table where people decide how and when to collect that data. I want to know how data will be analyzed and what adaptive algorithms will be employed. I want my students to have the ability to see their data and the algorithm they are interacting with.

I want in.

]]>My work as a ThinqStudio fellow has revolved around two projects at the center of two of my courses this academic year. This past fall, my students created augmented reality (AR) projects that brought their critical perspectives to bear on selected objects and locations that factor meaningfully into their everyday]]>https://thinqstudio.us/project-reflections-ar-oers/5deea14aa6492800016777adTue, 02 Jan 2018 19:41:34 GMT

My work as a ThinqStudio fellow has revolved around two projects at the center of two of my courses this academic year. This past fall, my students created augmented reality (AR) projects that brought their critical perspectives to bear on selected objects and locations that factor meaningfully into their everyday lives in Denver. In the coming spring, my special topics course will be collaboratively building an open educational resource (OER) devoted to introducing millennials to the intellectual history of computing; more specifically, we will create a series of ten video essays that each explain and contextualize a breakthrough idea in digital innovation, from 1945-2005.

This latter project derives from my experiences at the Digital Pedagogy Lab in Vancouver last summer. While OERs have long been an important aspect of the open education movement, my first real exposure to the concept came at the DPL. I’ve always aspired to devise assignments that lead students to write for readers beyond the classroom and create multimedia that can be accessed by the audience students wish to reach. The concept of OERs struck me as a particularly relevant framework through which to clarify the aims and payoffs of such work, as well as how it may fit into the wider ecosystem of online intellectual discourse.

The notable OERs that we examined at the DPL all seemed to occupy a space somewhere between peer-reviewed scholarship and student assignments. Each OER was, at least in part, conceived of and curated by a professor or two, while much of the content was created by their students, who each contributed a distinct piece to the larger project. These kinds of OERs are effectively endorsed and disseminated by the professor to academic colleagues in their field (and perhaps relevant publics), thus elevating the stakes and potential significance of student work. Furthermore, OERs tend to be most valuable when they fill a niche that is underrepresented or unaccounted for by a field’s existing textbooks. An OER can serve as a supplement to a popular textbook or as an accessible primer to innovative, complex scholarly work for which there is a dearth of undergraduate-oriented explanatory materials.

The intellectual history of computing will be the niche focus of the OER I’ll be creating with my students this spring. In our age of next big things and planned obsolescence, we tend to think of technological innovation in the present and future tense. Inventors and entrepreneurs often characterize innovation as a process of trial and error. To innovate is to iterate: make a prototype, learn something from it, and make another prototype. At a certain point, once a decade perhaps, all the tinkering and the hacking yields sudden insight into a bigger picture. The prototype, valuable in itself, comes to inspire a larger conceptual paradigm, a different set of questions and possibilities, a new way of envisioning the digital future. The video essays for my course’s OER will be about those pivotal moments, the birth of breakthrough ideas in digital invention. The OER assignment will prompt my students to communicate the vital legacy of these ideas to millennials—the generation of aspiring innovators who, despite having grown up with computers, have inherited no innate knowledge of the technology’s intellectual history. In fact, most of the software developers and programmers I’ve met have never even heard of (let alone read) leading technologists who advanced knowledge in those very fields during the 20thcentury. Our class OER will attempt to fill in these gaps by providing aspiring innovators with an accessible, audiovisual overview of the computer scientists whose legacies have laid the foundation for digital technology as we know it today.

This spring I will also be planning a half-day workshop on “Augmented Reality in Teaching and Learning,” building off my AR work with students this past fall (and my recent publications). The workshop will be designed to introduce educators to the pedagogical affordances associated with emerging AR technologies. Teachers in various disciplines have begun using AR to deliver site-specific content that facilitates experiential learning in public settings relevant to their curricula. For example, professors of architecture use AR to conduct classes in the shadows of the buildings their students are studying; rather than projecting slides in a classroom, the teacher embeds their pedagogical materials onto the architectural site. Similar opportunities for highly contextualized, mobile learning may be developed to serve the pedagogical aims of many academic subjects, from environmental biology and cultural geography to urban sociology and public history. After surveying recent AR projects, workshop participants will brainstorm and prototype some ways in which they might devise an AR lesson to enhance teaching and learning in one of their existing courses.

Of course, in the meantime, I’d love to hear from anyone who’s interested in these two projects (or the broader domain of OERs and AR in general). And I’m particularly keen to hear from anyone who’s pursued similar projects and has any suggestions to offer.